This week's cover of TIME features a story that I wrote about Twitter and innovation. Actually, that's not quite right: this week's cover features a tweet that I posted about the cover story I wrote for TIME about Twitter. I've been chuckling about this cover ever since the folks at TIME proposed it. What I love is that we actually synced everything up so that the cover shows an actual word-for-word tweet that I posted this morning, right before TIME's Rick Stengel revealed the cover on Morning Joe. We had one version where it also showed my current lat-long from my iPhone location, and we were contemplating having the location be something funny, as a little easter egg for the geo-nerds, but I think the final version came out better the way it is.

I called my Dad to tell him about it this morning, and his -- typically droll -- response was, "Well, that's a pretty roundabout way to get your face on the cover of Time."

It's hard to write about Twitter right now, because obviously so much is being said about it, but I tried to use the piece both to explain some of the new attributes of Twitter that have become visible in the past half-year (particularly revolving around search), and at the same use Twitter as a case study in how innovation increasingly happens today. The original draft had about an even balance between the two, but in the edits the piece became a bit more focused on Twitter itself and how we have started using it. I think those were smart changes to make, but there was some material that got cut on Columbia professor Amar Bhidé's super-interesting idea of "venturesome consumption" that I will try to resurrect elsewhere.

I'd been meaning to do a follow-up post collecting the responses to my SXSW speech on "Old Growth Media And The Future of News," but I kept putting it off because new articles and posts continued to roll in, and stitching them all together started to seem a little daunting. I've certainly never given a speech that generated so much discussion before, which tells you a little about how passionate people are about this issue right now.

The volume of response also underscores the value of releasing an essay version of a speech more or less simultaneously with the speech itself -- a trick I learned from my old friend Clay Shirky, who, entirely by coincidence, posted his own essay on the newspaper crisis the day I gave my speech in Austin. You'll see Clay's excellent essay mentioned in many of the links below; if you haven't had a chance to read it, be sure to check it out. For the most part, I think Clay and I approach the situation today from a similar perspective. Where we differ, I think, is in our sense of what the next model will be, or how knowable that next model is right now. Clay writes:

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

I suspect it's not quite all that mysterious, at least in the short-term, the scale of a decade or so. (Largely because the pace of technological advance and adoption is so much faster than in Gutenberg's time.) That's the whole point of the "old-growth" metaphor: that the entire ecosystem of news is going to look more and more like the technology news ecological niche that has been evolving for the past fifteen years. I'm hoping to write a bit more about the economics of this new model in the coming weeks; my colleague at outside.in, Mark Josephson, has already started explaining some of our thinking on the economics of local news. Expect much more from both of us on this topic shortly.

For now, though, here's a representative sample of responses to the SXSW speech that I put together this morning. If you've seen others, send them to me and I will try to add them over the next few days.

A week after I left Austin, the superb NPR show On Point devoted an hour to the issues I'd talked about in the speech; I was joined by Monica Guzman, one of the remaining journalists at the Seattle PI, and the always stimulating David Carr, of the New York TImes. On Point's Wen Stephenson wrote a lovely blog post afterwards, ruminating on Monica's clear enthusiasm for the PI's new online-only life, and reflecting back on the years Wen and I spent in the mid-nineties helping to figure out the rules of Web 1.0 publishing.

Mark Morford at the SF Gate delivered an excellent rant against the "geek gurus" (that would be Clay and me) that got my middle initial wrong but was otherwise a great incentive to write up another essay on the economics of all of this:

Steven P. Johnson's notion of a new media "ecosystem" seems to come closest to understanding the challenges facing the future of journalism, insofar as he at least gives decent props to the need for professional editors and journalistic know-how. The pros still have a big role in his vision. Alas, who will actually pay them and how the model will emerge not merely as an information engine, but also an economic one, well, he never manages to say. In fact, none of them do. Because no one had a goddamn clue.

Moford might want to look atthis post from Jonathan Weber of New West Networks, as a good description of a working business model for local journalism:

As a four-year veteran of a journalism-driven local online media start-up, I believe there’s a very viable business formula that’s actually quite simple, and here today: take advantage of new tools and techniques to cover the news creatively and efficiently; sell sophisticated digital advertising in a sophisticated fashion; keep the Web content free, and charge a high price for content and interaction that are delivered in-person via conferences and events. And don’t expect instant results.

Steven Johnson gave a great talk at SxSW about the recent history of publishing and distribution of news. His vision includes a role for organizations like CBC and other traditional media outlets. The validation, accreditation, accountability and editing of the abundance of news and news sources. The goal is to build relevance, trust and accountability for news consumers. To be agile and embrace new distribution and business models.

I'll be the guest on the Colbert Report tonight, at 11:30 EST on Comedy Central. The most surreal interview known to man, short of being interviewed by Ali G, so it should be entertaining. Last time I was on, he pretended to shoot me in the head with a nail gun, so I figure it can only get better...

Here's a recipe for a nice Sunday morning: you get to spend it at home for the first time in weeks, and the Times Book Review runs a very nice and thoughtful review of your book, in this case authored by Russell Shorto, who wrote The Island At The Center Of The World, which I have been dying to read. (And now I really have to!)

It's always fun to read reviews like this where the book is put into the context of my other work:

Johnson is an exemplar of the post-categorical age. In “Everything Bad Is Good for You,”
he brought brain chemistry and other disciplines to bear on pop
culture, and argued, among other things, that video games make you
smarter, not dumber. “The Ghost Map,”
his 2006 book about the great cholera epidemic in 19th-century London,
mixed bacteriology, epidemiology and history. Johnson’s new book, “The
Invention of Air,” shows its genre-mixing in its subtitle; it uses
Priestley as the fulcrum for a story that blends “science, faith,
revolution and the birth of America.” What enlivens the book is that
Johnson does not simply describe the system within which Priestley and
his contemporaries hashed out the features of classical science; he
sets it against other, later systems for comprehending physical
reality, showing laymen how far we have come from the classical age of
science.

I also really liked the emphasis on the open information networks theme of the book, which comes at the end of his review:

One reason Johnson seems to have been drawn to Priestley is because of
his style; Priestley was irrepressibly open, sharing his data and
observations with whoever was willing to listen. This may have cost him
some credit in discoveries, but to Johnson it makes Priestley the
godfather of the open-source era. And this may be where Johnson’s
genres blend together most fully. As a “compulsive sharer,” Joseph
Priestley believed wholeheartedly in the free flow of information: in
letting insights from science flow into the streams of faith and
politics, in trusting in the human mind as the ultimate homeostatic
system, able eventually to find its internal balance no matter how
large the disruption. In his day, the French and American Revolutions
were the major tests to that theory. We in our age have our own.

There's a slightly strange paragraph where it seems like I'm arguing that Priestley's great discovery was carbon dioxide, and not the production of oxygen in plant respiration, but in general it's a very engaged and flattering description of what I was trying to do with the book. Even the one or two criticisms he has of the book I think have a lot of merit. He mentions, for instance, Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men as a richer description of the Lunar Society, Priestley's intellectual posse during his Birmingham years. It most certainly is a richer description of that fascinating group, and I recommend that book to anyone interested in the period -- it's really a classic, I think.

Okay, so I'm almost done clogging up this blog with posts about the book tour events, but tonight's a special one: I'm going to do an Inauguration-themed talk about Invention of Air here in Brooklyn, tonight at 7PM at the Court Street Barnes and Noble, in Brooklyn Heights/Cobble Hill. It would be great to see folks from the neighborhood show up....

And thanks to everyone who came out and bought books on the west coast. We hit #7 on the Pacific Northwest nonfiction list (go Seattle and Portland!), and climbed to #19 (with a bullet) on Booksense, though we dropped a little on the Times list, down to #28. I noticed on the Booksense list that Invention is summarized there as "Biography of the theologian and chemist Joseph Priestley." How can anyone possibly resist a description like that? I mean, who needs to read about vampires, when you can read the biography of a leading 18th-century theologian and chemist?

Johnson's biography, with its digressions into theories of scientific and
cultural progress, and tales of Priestley's experiments, feels almost as
full of ingenuity and as delightful as its subject. It fizzes with
exposition, anecdote, and intellectual asides.

I just noticed that the Amazon page for the book has been updated with a collection of quotes from the reviews. Always exciting to see them all strung together. I've posted them after the jump if anyone is interested in reading through them all...

So, very good news today: Invention Of Air hit the Times extended bestseller list on its first full week, at #23, and the Booksense list at #25. That's the best start I've ever had for any of my books, and it means that I've now had four straight bestsellers. So thanks to all of you who have picked up a copy and come out to the events. There's lots more to come, though, so hopefully we will keep climbing the list in the coming weeks.

I'm in SF now -- thank god, because it's 70 degrees here and sunny, unlike frigid Brooklyn -- and will be doing four events over the next three days. Tonight I'm at the Towne Center in Pleasanton at 7. Then I'll be at Stacey's in downtown SF for a 12:30 event on Friday, then Kepler's that night in Menlo Park at 7:30. And then Saturday night at Book Passage in Corte Madera. We had three packed events in Seattle, so I'm challenging the Bay Area generate the kind of turnout that we saw up north.

A bunch of folks have asked me why there isn't a Kindle edition of Invention of Air; I've inquired about this, and apparently one is coming imminently. I will post news of its arrival as soon as it's out.

I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of nine books, host of one television series, and co-founder of three web sites. We split our time between Brooklyn, NY and Marin County, CA. Personal correspondence should go to sbeej68 at gmail dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of InnovationAn exploration of environments that lead to breakthrough innovation, in science, technology, business, and the arts. I conceived it as the closing book in a trilogy on innovative thinking, after Ghost Map and Invention. But in a way, it completes an investigation that runs through all the books, and laid the groundwork for How We Got To Now. (Available from IndieBound here.)

The Invention of AirThe story of the British radical chemist Joseph Priestley, who ended up having a Zelig-like role in the American Revolution. My version of a founding fathers book, and a reminder that most of the Enlightenment was driven by open source ideals. (Available from IndieBound here.)

The Ghost MapThe story of a terrifying outbreak of cholera in 1854 London 1854 that ended up changing the world. An idea book wrapped around a page-turner. I like to think of it as a sequel to Emergence if Emergence had been a disease thriller. You can see a trailer for the book here. (Available from IndieBound here.)

Mind Wide Open : Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday LifeMy first best-seller, and the only book I've written in which I appear as a recurring character, subjecting myself to a battery of humiliating brain scans. The last chapter on Freud and the neuroscientific model of the mind is one of my personal favorites. (Available from IndieBound here.)